The professional guild Liquid was caught exploiting a bug while cheating – and this has sparked a discussion in the community of World of Warcraft.
Currently, the race for the World First Kill of Queen Ansurek is taking place in World of Warcraft – the final boss in the raid Palace of Nerub-ar. The professionals have not yet reached Ansurek, but the best guilds in the world are slowly making their way. Every little advantage is crucial, but sometimes morally questionable methods are used.
Now, Team Liquid has been caught exploiting, as mages took advantage of an ugly bug that allowed them to deal massive damage.
WoW: Liquid exploits a game bug with the mage to their advantage
What was the exploit about? The exploit affects mages who chose the heroic talents of “Spellslinger.” The talent tree revolves – broadly speaking – around Arcane Shards. These are small spikes that the mage fires at their targets, leaving a debuff behind.
Normally, these shards are consumed when using certain spells. In most cases, it isn’t possible to have more than 8 stacks active on the opponent – in exceptional cases, 16, but even that only for a short duration.
However, with the exploit, it was possible to stack the shards on the opponent nearly to infinity, resulting in increasingly more damage. Only at an extremely high amount of stacks, beyond 200, does one switch to the target and let all shards explode at once to deal high damage again.
The exact process – including screenshots and clips as evidence – was published by tiker442 in the WoW subreddit:
The exploit was possible because the mage wrote a macro that targeted spells not at their current target, but merely at their focus target. At the same time, they had to not choose the last talent in the Spellslinger talent tree.
Only when both factors came together – using “focus” macros and not selecting the last talent – could this exploit be used.
Or to put it plainly: This exploit could not occur by chance.
Blizzard fixes the bug with mages
How did Blizzard respond? As soon as Blizzard was made aware of the bug, a hotfix was implemented immediately, and the heroic talent tree was changed. It is no longer possible to build up more than 8 stacks of the debuff before choosing the last talent. Therefore, it is no longer possible to exploit this bug and increase damage to absurd heights.
Many are demanding that the mages who exploited this bug knowingly should receive bans for several days. After all, this was clearly an exploit and a conscious exploitation of it. So, there is no talk of an “accident.”
Another bad piece of news recently came for guild bank owners – as many items seem to be gone forever.
